It was 2:14am and something was chewing inside my kitchen wall.

I had done everything the hardware store told me to do. A retired contractor next door explained, in about four minutes, why none of it was ever going to work.

The drawer. I knew what they were before I let myself know.

I lay there and listened to it.

Scratch, pause, scratch. Right behind the headboard side of the wall, where the kitchen is on the other side.

My husband sleeps through anything. I did not sleep again that night.

In the morning I opened the drawer with the kids' sippy cups and there they were. Little black grains on the white liner.

We are clean people. That was my first thought.

I want to say that part out loud, because I know you are thinking it too.

We wipe the counters. The floor gets swept every night. The trash goes out. And still, something was living in my kitchen wall and eating in my daughter's cup drawer.

I did what everyone does. I went to the hardware store.

Four traps. Bait licked clean, nothing caught. Thursday again.

I came home with 4 snap traps, a tub of peppermint oil, a bag of cotton balls and a box of steel wool.

The traps caught one on the second night. I will spare you the details. It did not matter. The scratching was back by Thursday.

The cotton balls made the kitchen smell like a candy cane for one day. On day 3 there were droppings sitting on the cotton balls. I am not exaggerating. On them.

The envelope. Where, when, how often.

The neighbor who used to build houses

Our neighbor Ron is a retired contractor. He saw the traps on my porch and asked how it was going.

I showed him the envelope. He looked at it for a while and then he said something that changed how I thought about the whole thing.

He said mice do not wander into a house. They follow the same way in every time. A gap at the dryer vent. The hole where the gas line comes through. The space under the garage door seal.

They pick a house in the few weeks before the first frost, by smell. And once a route gets used, it smells like a route to the next one.

Then he said the thing about the cotton balls.

Right smell, wrong time, wrong place, wrong carrier. That was his whole diagnosis.

What he told me to do, in order

Ron did not sell me anything. He gave me a list.

I went looking for the third thing.

The pouches

I found Revheria's repellent pouches. 12 sealed sachets, peppermint on top, cinnamon and cedarwood underneath to carry the smell after the peppermint fades. No poison. Nothing that snaps.

What sold me was that the instructions said the same things Ron said. Seal first. Trap what is inside. Then put a pouch at each end of the route and one where it comes in. Write the date on it. Check it at 30 days and replace it if you cannot smell it at arm's length.

It was $44.99 for the bag of 12. The traps and the oil and the cotton balls had cost me about $38 and three weeks.

What actually happened

I did it Ron's way.

Steel wool in the gap behind the dryer and around the gas line. Two traps behind the stove for a week. They caught one more and then nothing.

Then the pouches. One behind the stove. One under the sink where the pipes come through. One at the dryer vent. One at the garage door. One in the cup drawer cabinet, up high. One by the door from the garage into the house.

The before picture. A dead cotton ball and two fresh droppings.

The first week I found one dropping by the garage door. I could not tell if it was old.

After that, nothing. No droppings. No scratching. I kept listening at 2am out of habit for another week, and then one night I realized I had slept through.

At 30 days I checked the pouches. Still strong. I swapped them anyway and wrote the new date on each one.

The part I did not expect

The house feels like mine again.

That sounds dramatic for a $45 bag of sachets. But I had been lying awake for a month in a house I did not trust. I was opening drawers with my breath held.

Now the drawers are just drawers. The kids' cups are just cups.

An ordinary kitchen. That is the whole point.

If you are where I was

You have two options.

Revheria's pouches are only sold at revheria.com. They are not on Amazon and not in stores, so if you see them somewhere else it is not the same thing.

Questions I had